The Vitra design museum is internationally reowned, privately owned museum for design in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The museum's collection, focusing on furniture and interior design, is centered around the bequest of U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames, as well as numerous works of designers such as George Nelson, Alvar Aalto, Verner Panton, Dieter Rams, Jean Prouve, Richard Hutten and Michael Thonet. It is one of the world's largest collections of modern furniture design, including pieces representative of all major periods of styles from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards.
These works, originally the provate collection of Rolf Fehlbaum, are now not permanently on display, with the exception of representative selection of designer chairs that can be seen in Zaha Hadid's fire station on the Vitra premises. Instead, the museum puts on temporary collections focused on one particular desginer, often with loans from other collections. In turn, parts of the ocllection are lent to other institutions around the world.
In addition, the museum produces workshops, publications and museum products, as well as maintaining an archive, a restoration and conservation laboratory, and a research library. It also organises guided tours of the Vitra premises, a major attration to those interested in modern architecture.
The museum building, an architectural attraction in its own right, was Frank O. Gehry's first building in Europe, realised in cooperation with the Lorrach architect Gunter Pfeifer. Together with the museum, which was originally just designed to house Rolf Fehlbaum's private collection, Gehry also built a more functional-looking production hall and a gatehouse for the close-by Vitra factory.
Although Gehry used his trademark sculptural deconstructivist style for the museum building, he did not opt for his usual mix of materials, but limited himself to white plaster and titanium-zinc alloy. For the first time, he allowed curved forms to break up his more usual angular shapes. The sloping white forms appear to echo the Notre Dame du Haut chapel by Le Corbusier in Ronchamp, France, not far from Weil.
These works, originally the provate collection of Rolf Fehlbaum, are now not permanently on display, with the exception of representative selection of designer chairs that can be seen in Zaha Hadid's fire station on the Vitra premises. Instead, the museum puts on temporary collections focused on one particular desginer, often with loans from other collections. In turn, parts of the ocllection are lent to other institutions around the world.
In addition, the museum produces workshops, publications and museum products, as well as maintaining an archive, a restoration and conservation laboratory, and a research library. It also organises guided tours of the Vitra premises, a major attration to those interested in modern architecture.
The museum building, an architectural attraction in its own right, was Frank O. Gehry's first building in Europe, realised in cooperation with the Lorrach architect Gunter Pfeifer. Together with the museum, which was originally just designed to house Rolf Fehlbaum's private collection, Gehry also built a more functional-looking production hall and a gatehouse for the close-by Vitra factory.
Although Gehry used his trademark sculptural deconstructivist style for the museum building, he did not opt for his usual mix of materials, but limited himself to white plaster and titanium-zinc alloy. For the first time, he allowed curved forms to break up his more usual angular shapes. The sloping white forms appear to echo the Notre Dame du Haut chapel by Le Corbusier in Ronchamp, France, not far from Weil.
Architecture critic Paul Heyer described the general impression on the visitor as
"... a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly withour apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display..."
Vitra, the furniture company, have turned to a variety of major architects to design the buildings making up their manufacturing site near Basel, close to the German/Swiss/French border. As well as Frank Gehry, Alvaro Siza, Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid are all represented, in a cross between an industrial plant and a model village.
"... a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly withour apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display..."
Vitra, the furniture company, have turned to a variety of major architects to design the buildings making up their manufacturing site near Basel, close to the German/Swiss/French border. As well as Frank Gehry, Alvaro Siza, Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid are all represented, in a cross between an industrial plant and a model village.
The design museum houses temporary exhibitions on themes of furniture design, and Gehry's building makes a suitable host for them - in keeping with the theme, but - once inside - supporting, not competing with, the exhibitions.
Even though there is certainly no lack of significant contemporary buildings in the Basle region: for some years now, the biggest draw and place with the most far-reaching international presence has been the premises of the Vitra company's factory in Weil am Rhein. This is not solely due to the illustrious architects like Frank O. Gehry, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Nicholas Grimshaw and Alvaro Siza who have all realised significant designs here at the invitation of company head Rolf Fehlbaum. It is primarily because of the unique density and quality of the buildings assembled here in such a compact space. No wonder, then, that the company grounds have emerged as a Mecca for architecture lovers from all over the world in the past one and a half decades. To accommodate the extensive public interest in the buildings on the Vitra site, the Vitra Design Museum offers regular guided architectural tours in numerous languages.
The starting point for the tour is Gehry's sculptural-expressionistic museum building, completed in 1989 - the first of the California architect's buildings to be realised in Europe. The Conference Pavilion by Japan's Tadao Ando was also a European premiere. The introverted structure is visually impressive with its formal restraint and reduction to a few materials. Along with the museum and Conference Pavilion, the Fire Station by London-based Zaha Hadid is one of the highlights of the tour. Long an icon of deconstructivist architecture, this was the first work ever to be realised by the master architect who is today entrusted with prestigious major commissions throughout the world.
A provisional capstone in the architectural development of the grounds was set by the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza with the puristic seeming brick-clad Production Hall he connected to the neighbouring hall with a bridge-like roof construction. In past years, the architecture park in Weil has been enriched with two treasures from the history of building: a dome-shaped tent construction from the American architectural visionary Buckminster Fuller and a small knock-down petrol station by the French constructeur Jean Prouvé, which are likewise covered in the architectural tour.
The starting point for the tour is Gehry's sculptural-expressionistic museum building, completed in 1989 - the first of the California architect's buildings to be realised in Europe. The Conference Pavilion by Japan's Tadao Ando was also a European premiere. The introverted structure is visually impressive with its formal restraint and reduction to a few materials. Along with the museum and Conference Pavilion, the Fire Station by London-based Zaha Hadid is one of the highlights of the tour. Long an icon of deconstructivist architecture, this was the first work ever to be realised by the master architect who is today entrusted with prestigious major commissions throughout the world.
A provisional capstone in the architectural development of the grounds was set by the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza with the puristic seeming brick-clad Production Hall he connected to the neighbouring hall with a bridge-like roof construction. In past years, the architecture park in Weil has been enriched with two treasures from the history of building: a dome-shaped tent construction from the American architectural visionary Buckminster Fuller and a small knock-down petrol station by the French constructeur Jean Prouvé, which are likewise covered in the architectural tour.
Frank Gehry: "I love the shaping I can do when I'm sketching. And it never... occurred to me that I would do it in a building. The first thing I built of anything like that is Vitra... in Germany."
Vitra Design Museum Commentary
"Using a palette of strongly architectonic forms, the formative ideas explored in his own house were further developed at a comprehensive urban scale in his design for the Loyola Law School....The result was large-scale disparate elements dexterously juxtaposed—thrust inward or conversely pushing outward—against buildings and urban sculptural elements that themselves were formally not reconciled in a traditional sense. It further evidenced Gehry's interest in the discreet interlock of disparate forms which, through collision and seeming disorder, somehow combine to create a presence in resolution—probably the basic reason why Cubism and Expressionism is so obviously his connection to Modernism.
"This is readily apparent in his Vitra Design Museum, a small, 8,000-square-foot building on two floors basically for the exhibit of chairs, design, and educational programs. The building is a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly without apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display in much the same way that Gehry's 1990 proposal for the American Center in Paris will likewise bring the disparate functional and spatial demands...into a more centralized though again a visually discordant, volumetric totality..."
— from Paul Heyer. American Architecture: Ideas and Ideologies in the Late Twentieth Century. p233-234.
al co, Francesco. Frank Gehry: The Complete Works. Phaidon Press. 2003.
http://www.design-museum.de/museum/weil/fuehrung/index.php?sid=63e1d9668405a5113ddde1aaa9281909
http://www.design-museum.de/museum/weil/fuehrung/index.php?sid=63e1d9668405a5113ddde1aaa9281909
